TERRAFORMING TERRA
We discuss and comment on the role agriculture will play in the containment of the CO2 problem and address protocols for terraforming the planet Earth.
A model farm template is imagined as the central methodology. A broad range of timely science news and other topics of interest are commented on.

Saturday, June 20, 2015

Important Advance in Nitrogen Fixing

We actually have progress on nitrogen fixing with grasses. This is huge news and that is how we can dump our dependence on chemical nitrogen.

Obviously we want corn to successfully fix nitrogen.

At the same time i would love to have a nitrogen fixing variety of twitch grass with a genomic trigger that causes it to expire in the same year. This particularly nasty weed is the principal reason we use Roundup. Yet it is capable of choking a field in one season and sending down deep roots as well. Having it then die without issue would provide a wonderfully organically charged high nitrogen soil for the next year.

Better yet it would naturally choke out the wild version as well. I would love to spend a decade leading such a research effort just because I would wake up every morning totally motivated. It is still out there and it is still your sworn enemy.

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Move over Arabidopsis, there's a new model plant in town

A
radio tracer chamber at Brookhaven National Laboratory was needed to
test if Setaria viridis actually used nitrogen produced by the bacteria.
The scientists allowed only one leaf to contact the radioactive
nitrogen, so they could truly tell if it was being used.

As farmers spend billions of dollars spreading nitrogen on their fields
this spring, researchers at the University of Missouri are working
toward less reliance on the fertilizer.

Less dependence on nitrogen could start with a simple type of grass,
Setaria viridis, and its relationship with bacteria. The plant promises
to lay groundwork for scientists exploring the relationship between
crops and the fixing nitrogen bacteria that provide them the nitrogen
amount plants need daily.

"In science sometimes you have to believe because we often work with
such small microorganisms and DNA that you cannot see," said Fernanda
Amaral, co-author and MU postdoctoral fellow at Bond Life Sciences
Center. "Before this research no one had actually proved such evidence
that nitrogen excreted by bacteria could be incorporated into plants
like this."

Biological nitrogen fixation - where diazotrophic bacteria fix
atmospheric nitrogen and convert it to ammonium - provides a free way
for plants to alter and absorb the nutrient. Farmers have long known
that legumes like soybean fix nitrogen due to the symbiosis with
bacteria in the soil through development of nodules on their roots, but
since grasses like corn and rice don't form this specialized structures
that relationship has been trickier to explore.

Yet in fact, this team's experiments showed the grass Setaria viridis
received 100 percent of its nitrogen needs from the bacteria
Azospirillum brasilense when associated with plant root surfaces.

"I believed in these bacteria's ability, but I was really surprised that
the amount of nitrogen fixed by the bacteria was 100 percent," Amaral
said. "That's really cool, and that nitrogen can make so much of a
difference in the plant."

Worldwide farmers used more than 100 million tons of nitrogen on fields
in 2011, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture
Organization. In the same year, the U.S. alone produced and imported
more than $37 billion in nitrogen.

This grass can serve as a simple model for research, standing in for
grass relatives such as corn, rice and sugarcane to explore a similar
relationship in those crops. This research, 'Robust biological nitrogen
fixation in a model grass-bacterial association,' was published in the
March 2015 issue of the Plant Journal.

Proving that this grass actually uses nitrogen excreted from the
bacteria took some clever experiments, a global collaboration and a
nuclear reactor.

MU researchers in the lab of Gary Stacey, a Bond LSC investigator,
partnered with scientists in Brazil and at Brookhaven National
Laboratory in New York to find a robust plant model system.

They screened more than 30 genotypes of Setaria viridis grass, looking
for a strong nitrogen fixing response when colonized with three
different bacteria strains. They germinated the seeds in Petri dishes
and inoculated those three days after germination with a bacterial
solution. Then plants were transplanted into soil containing no
nutrients. By eliminating nitrogen in the soil, the scientists were able
to make sure that the bacteria was the only source of nitrogen for
plant.

The team settled on Azospirillum brasilense bacteria, which has been
used commercially in South America to improve crop plant growth. It
colonizes the surface of the roots and showed the greatest amount of
plant growth when associated with plant roots.

Proving that the bacteria truly fixed the nitrogen used by the plant,
required exposing plants to radioactive isotopes at Brookhaven National
Laboratory. That began with Nitrogen 13, an unstable radio isotope that
showed exactly where and how quickly this nutrient was taken up from the
bacteria.

"Nitrogen 13 is really sensitive matter with a half-life of less than 10
minutes, and we first thought there wouldn't be that much nitrogen
fixed by the plant," Amaral said. "We administered Nitrogen 13 only on
the roots, quickly scanned the samples and calculated how much of the
nitrogen the plants assimilated based on the decay analysis of the
tracer."

This experiment, paired with several others, showed that this model
grass truly incorporated the nitrogen released by the bacteria and
metabolizes it in several components.

But why does a type of grass that doesn't produce food matter so much?

The answer is time and simplicity.

"Corn is really good at responding to bacterial inoculation, but it's
very big and takes a long time to produce seeds and also the genome is
complex," said Beverly Agtuca, an MU Ph.D. student who worked on the
study. "Setaria viridis is a small plant that can produce a lot of seeds
faster, has a pretty simple genome and can serve as a model for
research."

That makes it perfect to explore how the plant actually uses its
bacterial partners, and labs around the world are already using this
plant model for research.

For the Stacey lab, the next step is to pinpoint the gene in the model grass that makes this possible.

"We want to identify the genes responsible for the interaction between
plant and bacteria and meanly the ones involved with the nitrogen
uptake," Fernanda said.

"We hope that will allow us to improve plant growth based on the gene to
further study. We believe that our findings can stimulate others
studies at this area, which seems to be a promise plant friendly way to
apply for promoting a sustainable agriculture, especially to crop
systems including bioenergy grass."

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About Me

Apr 2017 - 4.1 Mil Pg Views, March 2013 - Posted my paper introducing CLOUD COSMOLOGY & NEUTRAL NEUTRINO rigorously described as the SPACE TIME PENDULUM, September 2010 I am pleased to report that my essay titled A NEW METRIC WITH APPLICATIONS TO PHYSICS AND SOLVING CERTAIN HIGHER ORDERED DIFFERENTIAL EQUATIONS' has been published in Physics Essays(AIP) and appeared in their June 2010 quarterly. 40 years ago I took an honors degree in applied mathematics from the University of Waterloo. My interest was Relativity and my last year there saw me complete a 900 level course under Hanno Rund on his work in relativity,as well as differential geometry(pure math) and of course analysis. I continued researching new ideas and knowledge since that time and I have prepared a book for publication titled Paradigms Shift&. I maintain my blog as a day book and research tool to retain data and record impressions and interpretations on material read. Do join my blog and receive Four items of interest daily Monday through Saturday.